From: Charles Hixson (charleshixsn@earthlink.net)
Date: Thu Oct 24 2002 - 18:43:52 MDT
On Thursday 24 October 2002 16:18, Dehede011@aol.com wrote:
> I...
> Charles, all is abstraction. We wander through every path in the
> briar path but I for one don't know what you are talking about. I guess I
> do know one thing, if ever we point at a socialist country that was a hell
> on Earth for its inhabitants you want to define it out of the socialist
> camp. I suggest you read von Hayek's Road to Serfdom and learn how all
> these socialist countries are led inevitably to becoming lethal. According
> to him it is all well intentioned for the most part and it is inevitable.
> Ron h.
It's *BOTH* ways! There aren't any easy boundaries here. If you look at
things from a distance, it's easy to say that from this angle they look like
that. But this doesn't mean it captures anywhere near the entirity of it.
Consider a typical pre-industrial english village. For the moment we'll
ignore that castle on the hill. Neighbors share with neighbors. People try
to share fairly. But when it comes time to sell a cow, just watch the
negotiations! How am I to decide which parts of this are "socialist"?
Clearly they aren't all socialist. How am I to decide which parts are
capitalist? Clearly they aren't all all capitalist. And I don't have decent
definitions that will allow me to classify things.
Is that solid enough? I could talk about families, too. We all know how a
family works. Except that each one works slightly differently.
OK. Families. My sister was off in Canada, working for the health
department. She had guaranteed medical care, a good job, etc. My father
became terminally sick, and she gave up he job to come home and help my
mother watch him. (He needed watching 24 hours per day. A totally
impossible task, even for two people.) So. He dies, she goes back to work
in the US. Now, before she's worked 6 months there was an accident, and she
catches a patient slipping out of bed. Now he has strained tendons in both
arms. It's years later and the medical consensus is that she never will
recover. But after fighting with worker's comp for over a year, she's given
retraining for a job that she will be able to do. Now she's employed again
as an ergonomic specialist for a city. Currently she's studying the
collection of money from parking meters, in an attempt to keep the meter
collectors from developing RSI.
How do I pick that apart into the pieces that are socialist, the pieces that
are capitalist, and the rest? Is that grounded and specific enough for you?
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